My research focuses on richer tools for designing three-dimensional objects, particularly by novice and casual users, and on related problems in 3D synthesis and reconstruction. This research is driven by a more abstract interest in shape understanding at both the structural and semantic levels. (Why is a model of a chair not one of a chicken? What distinguishes a well-designed chair from a badly designed one? How can one build a better chair?) By building computational models of form, attribute and function, we develop new techniques for designing shapes (e.g. for 3D printing or architecture), for recognizing and reconstructing objects (e.g. in scanned cities or indoor environments), and for analysing large collections of three-dimensional data such as the 3D Warehouse.

Note [IITB]: I do not (ever) have internships to offer at IITB, and I do not give admissions advice. Please don't send me email regarding these (though I always encourage you to apply to IITB!).

Note [Adobe]: Adobe Research offers summer internships to outstanding students. Please follow the official procedure and/or talk to us when Adobe visits your university for recruiting, don't send me email. If you're interested in working with me (either in the US or in India), mention my name in your application. I do not take on students without a strong background in graphics/vision/machine learning (at least 2 out of 3).

News

[Oct 2018] I received the IIT Bombay Early Research Achiever Award (one of four recipients) for 2017.

[Jul 2018] We posted a new preprint on a recursive neural network architecture for indoor scene generation.

[Jul 2018] Our paper on learning local geometric descriptors that are sensitive to the physical material of the object was accepted to 3DV 2018.

[Apr 2018] My colleagues at IITB released a whitepaper analyzing the shortcomings of the current Aadhaar national identity scheme, and proposing technical and policy guidelines for a sounder approach. We have now posted a short summary of the whitepaper. All writings on the subject are collected here.

Code

I wrote and maintain Thea, a freely available, BSD-licensed library of C++ classes for computer graphics, primarily for 3D geometry processing (not to be confused with the concurrently developed Thea Render, which I am not connected with). It is the core library I use for nearly all my research projects, and it is also the core library for Adobe Fuse, which I originally authored.

Utilities (public-domain, unrestricted use)

catalog: Quickly generates a very basic HTML catalog, with track durations, for folks who organize their mp3's as Artist/Album/Track.mp3 (e.g. iTunes). Navigate to root directory of collection and run "catalog > output.html". Uses filename instead of ID3 tag for tracks (I get a lot of unpublished music without ID3s). Requires Perl.